ERMeCC and EGSH wish to invite you to a joint seminar taking place on September 26th 2019, 12:00 - 13:00, Mandeville Building T19-01 by : Ramón Spaaij: Forced migration, refugee settlement and sport: A new research agenda. The seminar will be moderated by Jacco van Sterkenburg and Isabel Awad.
Influenced by wider political and policy concerns about forced migration, recent years have witnessed increased attention among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners for sport and physical activity as a means and context for refugee wellbeing and integration. Considering this growing scholarly and policy attention, it is timely to take stock of, and critically reflect on, recent developments in this field of research.
This presentation critically synthesizes what is known about the sport and physical activity experiences of people with refugee and forced migrant backgrounds, and identifies key issues and directions for future research in this field. I discuss categorization, deficit approaches, and intersectionalities as three pressing challenges in this area of research. I conclude by formulating four research gaps that require critical attention in future research: the experiential dimensions of movement, the need to decolonize research, the space for innovative methodologies, and research ethics. The implications of these critical gaps and issues for sports communication and media will also be considered.
Ramón Spaaij is a Professor at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, and Special Chair of Sociology of Sport in the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Ramón's research focuses on questions of social cohesion, conflict and social change.
He has two established fields of research that address these questions: the sociology of sport and the sociology of terrorism. His work has contributed to contemporary academic and public debates on sport's relationship to diversity, social inclusion, community development and violence. Ramón is a regular media contributor, for example for The New York Times, The Huffington Post and The Conversation.